[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 17 (Friday, January 27, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E197-E198]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

     [[Page E197]]  WE NEED BALLISTIC MISSILE DEFENSE--AND WE HAVE 
                      ABSOLUTELY NO DEFENSE TODAY

                                 ______


                         HON. ROBERT K. DORNAN

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Friday, January 27, 1995
  Mr. DORNAN. Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues and citizens across 
our Nation to carefully consider the following statement by former 
Reagan defense official Richard Perle regarding our lack of ballistic 
missile defense. The ballistic missile threat is real, and the 
technology is readily available to deter and destroy incoming missiles 
and warheads. It will be unforgivable if another American soldier, 
sailor, airman, marine, or civilian is killed by a ballistic missile 
attack because Congress and the President failed to develop and deploy 
available missile defense technology.
  Statement by Richard Perle, Fellow, American Enterprise Institute, 
      Before the Committee on National Security, January 25, 1995

       Mr. Chairman, I want to thank the Committee for inviting me 
     to appear before you as you consider the ballistic missile 
     defense provisions of H.R. 7, the National Security 
     Revitalization Act.
       I first came to Washington nearly 24 years ago to work on 
     precisely this issue--the defense of the United States 
     against ballistic missiles--for Senator Henry M. (Scoop) 
     Jackson.
       Scoop was a committed Democrat. But he was also an ardent 
     supporter of ballistic missile defenses. In those days the 
     defense of the United States was not inevitably a partisan 
     matter. And it is my great hope, Mr. Chairman, that with 
     these hearings and with new Congressional management willing 
     to reconsider old ideas and explore new ones, the urgent need 
     to develop and deploy a defense against ballistic missiles 
     will once more gain the bipartisan support that men like 
     Scoop Jackson worked so hard to achieve.
       Looking back over the quarter century since Lyndon Johnson 
     first proposed a limited deployment of strategic defenses, 
     and looking forward to the proposals in H.R. 7, one is left 
     with an eerie sense of deja vu. I say eerie because, as 
     things stand today, we have no capacity whatsoever to 
     intercept ballistic missiles that might be aimed at the 
     United States. None. Zero. We are unable to stop even a 
     single missile, even a missile fired accidentally, even a 
     missile fired accidentally under circumstances in which the 
     perpetrator of the accident did everything he could to help 
     us avert a calamity. We are totally, completely, abjectly 
     vulnerable.
       Indeed, Mr. Chairman, one could reasonably argue that, 
     despite breathtaking technological advances in sensors, 
     propulsion, guidance and data processing, we are further than 
     ever from the goal of developing a strategic defense. For 
     despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the sharp rise 
     in concern about the extent to which its nuclear missiles are 
     under absolute control, an American policy favorable to 
     strategic defense is more remote than ever.
       Despite the energetic effort of several hostile nations to 
     acquire nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles; despite the 
     difficulty of controlling the missile technologies that will 
     inevitably spread; despite the reasonable expectation of the 
     American people that its elected government will act 
     prudently to defend them against known threats--despite all 
     this it is now the official policy of the Government of the 
     United States that America shall remain undefended.
       I urge you to change that policy quickly, unambiguously and 
     unapologetically by adopting into law Title II of the Defense 
     Revitalization Act.
       The source of the current policy is difficult to 
     understand, much less defend. It is, above all, an intensely 
     ideological policy devised by the opponents of strategic 
     defense. Opposition to defense is frequently emotional, 
     although the depth of feeling is often masked
      by claims to practical or budgetary or technical doubts 
     about the feasibility or affordability or effectiveness of 
     specific systems. It is based in part on the now 
     irrelevant but passionately held Cold War belief that 
     American strategic defenses would elicit additional 
     offensive deployments by the Soviet Union, thus fueling an 
     arms race and exposing us to greater danger. This was the 
     view of the opponents of strategic defenses when I came to 
     Washington in 1969 in the midst of the Cold War and, 
     curiously, the opponents of those years remain the 
     opponents of strategic defense to this very day.
       Everything affecting this antiquated intellectual construct 
     has changed: the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union no longer 
     exists, the interaction of offensive and defensive forces 
     (which was never as simple as the critics of strategic 
     defense thought) is radically different today, the efficacy 
     of classical deterrence in these changed circumstances is 
     increasingly questionable, the technical feasibility of 
     effective defenses is immeasurably greater (especially 
     against less-sophisticated threats)--in short, everything is 
     changed except the stubborn, unthinking, myopic opposition to 
     any serious, national defense against ballistic missiles.
       This is an opposition enshrined in an obsolete treaty 
     concluded 22 years ago in a fundamentally different world. It 
     is an opposition perpetuated by an Administration that can't 
     bear the idea of picking up where Ronald Reagan left off or 
     taking on the apparatciki from Andrei Gromyko's foreign 
     ministry who cling to their jobs by opposing sensible 
     modifications to the ABM Treaty that would free us and Russia 
     from constraints that leave us both defenseless in a 
     dangerous world.
       Another source of opposition to strategic defense is the 
     idea that only a perfect defense is worth having. When the 
     issue was a defense against the massive Soviet missile force, 
     the opposition argued that because even the best possible 
     defense could be penetrated (``Some missiles will always get 
     through'') there was no point in attempting any defense at 
     all. Now that the threat is much smaller--perhaps a handful 
     of missiles or even a single missile fired accidentally--the 
     idea of a partial defense capable of dealing with modest 
     threats ought to appeal to those critics who once claimed to 
     be daunted by the task of defending against thousands of 
     missiles. But they remain unmoved, mired in opposition to any 
     defense, frozen in time, say around 1970.
       In the seriously mistaken belief that we must now agree on 
     a line separating theater defense systems, which are not 
     limited under the ABM Treaty, from national territorial 
     systems which are, the Administration has embarked on a 
     negotiation with the Russians that threatens to throttle 
     effective theater defenses in their infancy.
       I note that the House leadership has written to the 
     President to ask that he allow the Congress to examine with 
     care the many issues this negotiation raises. This seems to 
     me a reasonable request, one that a President interested in 
     bipartisanship on defense matters would readily grant. I hope 
     he agrees. But if he does not I would urge the Congress to 
     legislate against the use of appropriated funds for the 
     purpose of defining lines of demarkation between theater and 
     strategic defenses. A negotiation on this subject is bound to 
     become a quagmire--and that would be true even if there were 
     not plenty of opponents of strategic defense within the 
     Administration who are eager to see theater defenses 
     submerged in a quagmire and who will do nothing to steer 
     clear of it.
       On this matter our position should be clear and simple. 
     Theater defenses are not limited by the ABM Treaty and for 
     this reason we are not obliged to discuss our theater defense 
     program with the Russians or anyone else. If the Russians 
     wish to assert that we
      are developing a nationwide defense in the guise of a 
     theater defense, let them charge us with a violation of 
     the ABM Treaty. If and when they do make such an 
     allegation we will discuss and allay their concerns in the 
     forum provided for in the ABM Treaty.
       What we would be most foolish to do is try to gain Russian 
     approval for the performance parameters of theater defenses. 
     Yet that has been the Administration's approach until now, 
     and you should know that it threatens our ability to field 
     theater systems capable of defending our men and women on 
     distant battlefields. We owe it to our troops to provide them 
     with the best possible defense against the battlefield 
     missiles that may be aimed at them. To constrain our program 
     in order to ``strengthen'' the ABM Treaty by broadening its 
     scope would be foolish in the extreme and the Congress should 
     act if necessary to prevent this happening.
       Opponents of strategic and theater defense are not at all 
     troubled by the additional constraints on our freedom to 
     develop technically optimal systems that are bound to result 
     from negotiations with the Russians. On the contrary, I 
     believe they view these negotiations as another device by 
     which the prospects of a cost-effective defense might be 
     further diminished.
       Mr. Chairman, there is already a wide range of opinion as 
     to the sort of architecture we should adopt in devising 
     systems of national and theater defense. If anything, 
     controversy on this question is likely to increase over time 
     as the technical community debates the relative merits of 
     space-based interceptors or lasers or land-based missiles or 
     space-based sensors, and the like. Competing technologies 
     have their adherents and as technology develops opinions will 
     change. This is all to the good. No one now enjoys a monopoly 
     of wisdom as to the most effective systems or the lowest 
     technical risk or the least-cost solutions to the problems of 
     theater and national defense.
       [[Page E198]] But it is not necessary for the Committee to 
     come to conclusions on these and other technical issues in 
     order to go forward confidently to require the Secretary of 
     Defense to tell you how he plans to carry out Title II's 
     mandate to end the policy of deliberate vulnerability by 
     developing theater and strategic ballistic missile defenses.
       In developing his plans, the Secretary of Defense should 
     consider that, insofar as the ABM Treaty is an obstacle to 
     implementing Title II, he should recommend the ways in which 
     the Treaty ought to be changed. There are, after all, 
     provisions for amendment in the terms of the ABM Treaty. They 
     were presumably placed there by men who realized that future 
     circumstances might require new approaches. In this they were 
     surely right. We should approach the Russians at the highest 
     levels with a view to cooperatively amending the Treaty to 
     take account of the strikingly different world in which we 
     are now living.
       But if the Russians, for whatever reason, should oppose 
     reasonable revisions to the Treaty and insist on blocking us 
     from defending ourselves against the North Koreas, Libyas, 
     Iraqs and the like, we should make clear our readiness to 
     withdraw from the Treaty under the appropriate article and 
     after the appropriate notice. If we are prepared to withdraw, 
     we should find it unnecessary to do so.
       Mr. Chairman, the Congress has it within its power to force 
     a reconsideration of the opposition to ballistic missile 
     defense that prevailed during the last decades of the Cold 
     War. It is a new Congress. I believe it is up to the task of 
     new thinking about defense, and your hearing this morning 
     encourages me to believe that antiquated ideas that cannot be 
     made persuasive as we face the new millennium should be 
     relegated to the history of the one we will leave behind.
     

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